Thread by @DSA_SF

There’s a lot of confusion right now around the housing shortage that capitalists created, and specifically about our endorsed Supervisor @DeanPreston , so let’s talk housing, and how to provide it at scale. 🧵currentaffairs.org/2021/11/san-fr…

Yesterday Dean Preston's appropriation request PASSED out of committee for the city to help acquire apartment buildings to provide housing for people, not for profit. This is the bold and pragmatic leadership that comes from having a socialist in power.

https://twitter.com/deanpreston/status/1461154376744013826?s=21

It is undeniable that this city is in a housing crisis. While rental units and commercial space sits empty, housing prices have escalated to the point where only 7% of San Francisco workers can afford the median cost of housing in their own city.
sfccho.org/housing-our-wo…

At the same time, racial and class displacement and the homelessness crisis have become so intense and normalized that fully 1% of our city’s residents are without permanent housing or are homeless.

This happens because when people get displaced or evicted, they often can’t make their way back into housing in the same area. So either they leave or they end up homeless.

There is a human cost to evictions that can’t be calculated. This city is made by its people, and yet its people are victims to the housing market.

To build housing stock at scale, we must break out of capitalist logic and create the world we want to see. At this moment, that means investing in public & social housing.

Many YIMBY activists get the picture: this is a necessary and obvious step to providing affordable housing at scale.

https://twitter.com/IDoTheThinking/status/1461035859562713104?s=20

But there are many YIMBRos like Garry Tan who see this crisis as an opportunity to double down on the right-wing politics that got us here: housing as a store of value and investment vehicle rather than human right.

Many of these YIMBRos have never held public power, and their dreamy capitalist idealism of supply-demand curves show that they don’t understand that the root cause of housing scarcity is commodification.

The only politically-mature way to dig ourselves out of this problem is to address the root cause.

There is not enough housing stock on the market because the capitalists have no incentive to provide everyone a home. If the developers and landlords saw profit in giving us affordable homes, we’d all have homes.

As a tenants’ rights advocate for decades and the Vice Chair of the Land Use Committee, Dean is constantly thinking about how to enforce the right to housing while protecting San Franciscans.

https://twitter.com/deanpreston/status/1449519449946537984

It’s a delicate balance that those in power are entrusted with, but we support Dean and work with him to make our shared vision a reality.

We're going to need all the help we can get, because we're up against powerful lobbies of developers, landlords, NIMBYs, and a Mayor who uses her power to sandbag popular support for public housing, such as by blocking voter-approved funding for housing. sfindependentjournal.com/mayor-announce…

Solving these tough problems requires a lot more than creating outrage on Twitter. It’s about getting stuff done in real life. If you want to actually fix the housing crisis in SF, join us. dsasf.org/join